While there are those who are openly celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk, others are trying to find more subtle ways to justify what happened to him, which is just as disgusting, if not more so.
Horror author Stephen King is one such person.
After an outpouring of love for Charlie hit the internet, it was necessary to defend Charlie from the lies being told about him. There was an endless stream of hate thrown his way, and not just from internet nobodies, but even from talking heads on television.
King, for his part, decided to try to peddle the idea that Charlie advocated for the stoning of gays, something that Charlie never said. As Defiant L's points out on X, Charlie was actually of the mind that Christians should love everyone, and that gays should be welcomed into the conservative movement.
I'd say Stephen King should be ashamed of himself, but what's the point? pic.twitter.com/fkTg1Mmxzk
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) September 12, 2025
King was wrong, and the dogpiling he received from the rest of the internet shoved that fact directly in his face to the point where he couldn't maintain the lie. He deleted the post and apologized.
"I was wrong, and I apologize. I have deleted the post," he wrote on X in reply to the Defiant L's post.
I was wrong, and I apologize. I have deleted the post. https://t.co/v6NOIUGEvS
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) September 12, 2025
King's apology isn't really going over well with anyone, it seems. Looking at the replies to his "mea culpa," no one is buying that his apology is sincere, and no one can exactly blame people for it.
King is one of those people who has painted people on the right with the broad brush of pure evil, spreading falsehoods about people as if it were as easy as breathing.
And that is, in my opinion, one of the things that the left seriously needs to address about itself. The left is so ready to believe the worst about its political opponents that it doesn't stop to wonder if any of it's true. Many of the responses to King addressed just that.
Why were you so desperate to believe it, though? It's time for some introspection.
— Carl Benjamin 🏴 (@Sargon_of_Akkad) September 12, 2025
Forming an opinion of someone based only on what the people in your own bubble say is a bad idea. Hope you realized that.
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) September 12, 2025
Do you even slightly understand how this is done to conservatives constantly Stephen?
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 12, 2025
It's not just that lies are told about us; it's that the left is so ready to believe it that they'll latch onto any claim made and spread it as if it's the absolute truth. That habit has to stop.
I think Gad Saad put it well in his post to King:
Dear @StephenKing, while it is laudable that you have apologized for your post, I would urge you to do the following: Examine why you had the impulse to post such a reaction when a young man had been assassinated. That you succumbed to your dark impulses speaks to your having been parasitized by ideological capture. Your hate for Republicans was greater than your empathy for a wife and two young children who had lost their anchor. Charlie was a lovely human being that did not deserve your nastiness. Never let your humanity be overridden by your orgiastic tribalism.
Dear @StephenKing, while it is laudable that you have apologized for your post, I would urge you to do the following: Examine why you had the impulse to post such a reaction when a young man had been assassinated. That you succumbed to your dark impulses speaks to your having… https://t.co/oZz0LpxlXH
— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) September 12, 2025
Saad's point is well-made. King's hatred and prejudice caused him to believe something about a person that he shouldn't have in the first place, and that caused him to then push a dehumanizing view of him without even questioning whether or not it was right to do so.
This is the left currently. They've become so used to operating under the assumption that they're fighting pure evil that they didn't think to question if they actually were. Conservatives, Republicans, and anyone who isn't really willing to take part in their ideological rigidity have been so dehumanized that they don't even feel the need to second-guess themselves or peer deeper into a person to see the truth about them.
C.S. Lewis actually clocked this very phenomenon in his day in the book Mere Christianity:
Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that”, or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second, then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.
If the left is going to cure itself of its unreasonable hatred, it first has to understand that the right are humans who aren't as bad as their preconceptions tell them. That's what Charlie was trying to do, and despite giving everyone a clear and powerful example of who the right was, they couldn't get past their own hatred.
Perhaps Charlie's murder will wake up many to the fact that they were wrong all along.
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